heritance transmitted from parent to son: and gathered together in herds from distant parts, they have no family character to support in the place to which they have been transplanted. Their employments, too, unlike those of the handicraft and the agriculturist, are usually so conducted as to be equally pernicious to mind and body. The consumption of life in some manufactories even in those which might at first be thought most innocuous, though it may be a consolation to those philosophers who are afraid of being crowded at the table of nature, would make good men shudder if the account could be fully laid before them.

John Hunter predicted that our manufactories would engender new varieties of pestilence. New and specific diseases they have produced; but the only pestilence which has yet manifested itself is of a moral nature. Physical diseases are not more surely generated by crowding human beings together in a state of filth and wretchedness, than moral ones by herding them together in a state of ignorance. This is the case under the least unfavourable circumstances which can be imagined; but it is doubly so under the manufacturing system, where children are trained up in the way wherein that system destines them to go, as soon as their little fingers can twirl a thread, or feed a machine. When that system was at its height, the slave trade itself was scarcely more systematically remorseless. The London workhouses supplied children by wagon-loads to those manufactories which would take them off the hands of the parish; a new sort of trade was invented, a set of child-jobbers travelled the country, procuring children from parents whose poverty was such as to consent to the sacrifice, and undertaking to feed, clothe, and lodge them for the profits of their labour. In this manner were many of our great manufactories supplied! the machinery never stood still. One set of these poor children worked by day, another by night, and when one relay was relieved, they turned into the beds which had been vacated by the other, warm as the others had left them! When this system had continued long enough for those who lived through so unnatural a childhood to reach the age of maturity, it was found that the girls, when they married, were utterly unable to perform the commonest and most indispensable domestic work: and the remedy which was devised, in future, was, that they should go to school to learn these things for an hour in the day after they had done work!

These evils have been mitigated: the hellish practice of nightwork (it deserves no gentler qualification) is nearly, if not totally, disused; but enough which is evil remains to produce irreparable injury to the individuals, and the most serious mischief to the community. The existing race of the manufacturing

poor have been trained up certainly without moral, and, it may be said, without religious instruction also; for if a pulpit lesson should now and then by accident reach their ears, there is little chance of its penetrating farther, utterly unprepared as they are to receive it. Among the philosophers-errant who mislead themselves as well as others in confounding the distinctions between right and wrong, there are some who, after wandering about the debatable ground between good and evil, recover the right path, and find grace to thank Providence for their escape. The bias inclines that way in the middle and higher ranks; for morals, as well as manners, follow the mode, and decorum, at least, is in fashion. But the class of which we have been speaking, have more to resist at the same time that they are less prepared for resistance. He who has ever seen the habitations of the citypoor in the cellars and garrets of courts and alleys, will easily believe that the fireside of the pot-house holds out a stronger temptation than even the physical effect of the liquor. Goldsmith has told us how such places

"impart,

An hour's importance to the poor man's heart;"

But they do more than this: they afford a stimulus of society which he cannot find elsewhere; strong humour and vulgar wit come with double fascination to those whose intellectual powers are stagnant at home; the coarseness of boisterous mirth acts upon them with double excitement; and if they give themselves up to the lowest vices, ought we to wonder at this, when their better faculties have never been brought into action? Scarce lower than the angels in the capacity of his nature, man is yet, when left to himself, scarcely above the brutes; and if he be depraved, as well as ignorant, he is then chiefly distinguished from them by the fatal prerogative of possessing a wicked will and greater powers of mischief. When his diviner part has never been called forth, the mere animal is all that remains, and mere animal gratification must be the natural end and aim of his blind desires.

These are not the mere imaginations of a speculative moralist. It is notorious that the manners of the people in manufacturing districts are peculiarly dissolute. Saint Monday is the only saint in the journeyman's calendar; and there are many places where one of the working-days of the week is regularly set apart for drunkenness, like a sabbath of irreligion. However high the wages may be, profligacy of every kind keeps pace, and draws . after it its inevitable punishment of debility, disease, poverty,

want, and early death. For the main cause of the increase of pauperism it is needless to go farther than the increase of manufactures-that very increase which has so often been triumphantly appealed to in proof of the prosperity of the country. Even in quiet times, and when, to all outward appearances, the country was flourishing beyond all example in former ages, the evil was felt, an evil in itself of sufficient magnitude, but of the most frightful nature when those circumstances are considered which give it a direct political bearing. This tendency was noticed some years ago in Espriella's Letters, a book in which, amid lighter matter, grave subjects are sometimes touched with a deeper spirit of thought than appears upon the surface.

"Two causes," says the author of that book, "and only two, will rouse a peasantry to rebellion; intolerable oppression, or religious zeal either for the right faith or the wrong: no other motive is powerful enough. A manufacturing poor is more easily instigated to revolt. They have no local attachments; the persons to whom they look up for support, they regard more with envy than respect, as men who grow rich by their labour; they know enough of what is passing in the political world to think themselves politicians; they feel the whole burden of taxation, which is not the case with the peasant, because he raises a great part of his own food; they are aware of their own numbers; and the moral feelings which in the peasant are only blunted are in these men debauched. A manufacturing populace is always ripe for rioting: the direction which this fury may take is accidental. In 1780 it ran against the catholics; in 1790 against the dissenters. Governments who found their prosperity upon manufactures sleep upon gunpowder.

"Do I then think," continues the writer, "that England is in danger of revolution? If the manufacturing system continues to be extended, increasing, as it necessarily does increase, the number, the misery, and the depravity of the poor, I believe that revolution inevitably must come, and in its most fearful shape. That system, if it continues to increase, will more effectually tend to ruin England than all the might and all the machinations of her enemies, were they ten times more formidable than they are. It communicates just knowledge enough to the populace to make them dangerous, and it poisons their morals. The temper of the mob has been manifested at the death of Despard, and there is no reason to suppose that it is not the same in all other great towns as in London. It will be well for England when her cities shall decrease, and her villages multiply and grow; when there shall be fewer streets and more cottages. The tendency of the present system is to convert the peasantry into poor; her policy should be to reverse this, and to convert the poor into peasantry; to increase them and to enlighten them; for their numbers are the strength, and their knowledge is the security, of states."

Whether this writer be Spaniard or Englishman, the Luddites and the temper which the mob in London, as well as in Nottingham, manifested upon the murder of Mr. Perceval, have but too fully approved his foresight. How that temper has been produced deserves farther investigation. The state of parties and the press will go far towards explaining it. That there is any organized plan for effecting a revolution in this country we are far from asserting or believing, but it by no means follows that the preparatory work of revolution is not going on. There is no commissariat for supplying London, and yet London is supplied with a regularity and abundance which no commissariat, however perfect, could possibly accomplish. If one political writer villifies every measure of the existing administration; if another reviles all parties in their turn with equal virulence; if a third systematically holds up the royal family to derision and abhorrence; and a fourth labours to bring the whole system of government into contempt and hatred; though the first should merely be the faithful adherent of a political faction; though mere malevolence should be the influencing motive of the seoond; the third be actuated by mere humour, or by neediness acting upon a profligate mind; and the fourth be led astray by juvenile presumption, or mistaken zeal; though these persons should be utterly unconnected, or even hostile to each other, they coöperate as effectually together to one direct end as if they were bound by oaths and sacraments, and that end is as directly the overthrow of their country as if all four were the salaried instruments of France.

He who finds a factious newspaper upon his breakfast table, and casting his eyes over its columns while he sips his coffee, smiles at its blunders, or at most vents a malediction more in wonder than in indignation at the impudent villainy of its falsehoods, has but a faint conception of its effects upon the great body of its readers. Journals of this description are not designed for those whose place in society indisposes them to revolutionary tenets, or whom a sound understanding, and a mind well stored, have fortified, as with Mithridate, against such poison. But there are thousands, and tens of thousands, prepared for it by the manufacturing system as completely as soldiers, by want and cold, are prepared for camp contagion. It is upon men whom that system has depraved that the diatribes of the anarchists operate with full effect. Those persons, if there be any such, who would keep the people ignorant because they rely upon their ignorance as a preservative, are not more lamentably erroneous in judgment than ignorant themselves of the state of the society in which they live. Where one who can read is to be found, all who have ears can hear. The weekly epistles

of the apostles of sedition are read aloud in tap-rooms and pothouses to believing auditors, listening greedily when they are told that their rulers fatten upon the gains extracted from their blood and sinews; that they are cheated, oppressed, and plundered; that their wives and children are wanting bread, because a corrupt majority in parliament persists in carrying on a war which there was no cause for beginning, and to which there can be no end in view; that there is neither common sense nor common honesty in the government; that the liberty of the press has been destroyed, and they are, in fact, living under military law; that they are a flogged nation, and flogging is only fit for beasts, and beasts they are, and like beasts they deserve to be treated, if they submit patiently to such wrongs and insults. These are the topics which are received in the pot-house, and discussed over the loom and the lathe: men already profligate and unprincipled, needy because they are dissolute, and discontented because they are needy, swallow these things when they are getting drunk, and chew the cud upon them when sober. The lessons are repeated day after day, and week after week. If madder be administered to a pig only for a few days his bones are reddened with its dye; and can we believe that the bloody colouring of such "pig's-meat"* as this will not find its way into the system of those who take it for their daily food?

They who are labouring to seduce the people, fail not to allure them (like the tempter of old) with promises of unattainable good, perverting to vile purposes the sacred names of laws, and liberty, and constitution, and dealing out vague generalities and inapplicable truisms, while their main appeal is to the vanity and the evil passions of an uninstructed multitude. Marat and Hebert were continually talking to the people of their rights, and representing themselves as the enlightened friends of humanity. Our sappers and miners tread faithfully in their steps as far as they have hitherto gone, and there are but too many circumstances which favour the machinations of such mischievous and wicked men.

Among these circumstances the manufacturing system again presents itself in the first rank. The extent to which it has been carried makes a large part of our population dependent for employ, which is, in fact, for subsistence, upon other countries;

"Pig's-meat," "hog's-wash," and "food for the swinish mul. titude," were titles of seditious brochures published by Daniel Isaac Eaton and Spence, the earlier and honester but less dexterous apostles of anarchy in this country. Both these men were political fanatics. Pure profligacy, rather than mistaken principle, instigates some of their successors.